ArchiveJanuary 2015

By: Metro Canada Published on Fri Jan 30 2015 It should have been the question of the campaign. Every leading mayoral candidate at every debate should have been asked about it. And every leading mayoral candidate should have been expected to come forward with a plan — a realistic one. It's too late now, of course. But let's ask anyway. In 2013 the provincial government announced they’d...

By: Metro Canada Published on Wed Jan 28 2015 Mayor John Tory is taking flak from all sides over his decision to use a line of credit from Queen's Park to plug an $86-million hole in the city’s operating budget. It’s not undeserved. Using an interest-bearing loan to balance the city’s books is decidedly not standard practice and, though the terms of the loan have not yet been disclosed, it’s...

By: Matt Elliott Metro, Metro Published on Mon Jan 26 2015 A common political pet peeve of mine is politicians who make like they’ve been blindsided by information once they take office. In my experience, their surprise is hardly ever justified. The new information they claim to have received is usually not new. There were two examples of this kind of thing over the past week, both involving...

By: Metro Published on Thu Jan 22 2015 I wrote a few times over the past year about how the city’s 2015 operating budget looked pretty grim. Despite cheerful views from most mayoral candidates who argued we'd be just fine with low property tax increases now and forever, the numbers pointed to a perfect storm of factors that would put a real squeeze on city finances. It turns out the numbers...

By: For Metro Published on Wed Jan 21 2015 Toward the end of his presentation on the city’s draft 2015 operating budget, Toronto’s chief financial officer Rob Rossini turned to newbie budget chief Coun. Gary Crawford and jokingly asked, “You really wanted to be budget chief, didn’t you?” People laughed. Rossini had just gone over budget projections for the next two years, and the projections...

The honeymoon period for Mayor John Tory ends this week, when he runs headlong into the first serious obstacle of his term: the city’s 2015 budget. And I’m pretty jazzed about it. Sure, I know, the municipal budget doesn’t sound exciting, but it matters. All of the stuff we read over the course of the year about the city improving transit, repairing infrastructure or helping the homeless won’t...